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Is Radeon then going to become a mess of if's and IFDEF's, Bridgman? All that hand-tuning to get every little ounce of performance out of every card or are the devs thinking that its best to keep the code as clean as possible and just go for the 'middle of the road, good for most but not perfect for all' approach?

I think it's more likely that the hand-tweaking optimizations won't happen and the open source driver will stay clean.

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Why is HD6450 performance so much different (terrible) than the others? I happen to have a laptop with that card (hybrid setup) but in all cases, Intel card was WAY faster. It's a different story on windows though.

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I think it's more likely that the hand-tweaking optimizations won't happen and the open source driver will stay clean.

That's what we've been assuming anyways...

Is the documentation / knowledge out there so if a dev WANTED to start hand-tuning they could? I'm all for the driver staying clean, in my book understandable and maintainable code is better than handtuning the crap and making a mess out of code for that extra few percentage points of performance. I'm just making sure that if someone really really REALLY wanted to, the information was out there and then Mesa / the kernel devs could decide which path (performance or cleanliness) they wanted to walk.

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I think it's more likely that the hand-tweaking optimizations won't happen and the open source driver will stay clean.

That's what we've been assuming anyways...

I assume most of the missing 50% performance in radeon is not due to "some secret magic performance unlocking code" that catalyst has,
but the accumulated effect of dozens of small optimizations that would make radeons code unclean if they were applied. Is that a fair assumption?

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I assume most of the missing 50% performance in radeon is not due to "some secret magic performance unlocking code" that catalyst has,
but the accumulated effect of dozens of small optimizations that would make radeons code unclean if they were applied. Is that a fair assumption?

Correct. Not only are there are number of 3D driver optimizations that could be done, there are also a lot of memory management optimizations that could be done to improve performance.

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While there are some Linux gamers, most of us are more concerned about scrolling PDF.js pages without dropping frames in maximized windows and driving 2, 3, or more monitors than we are about demanding 3D OpenGL games. It would be nice to see the cairo-perf-trace benchmarks become part of all the GPU and graphics stack reviews.

It doesn't matter how well Quake 3 runs if I can't get vsynced compositing on all screens.

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While there are some Linux gamers, most of us are more concerned about scrolling PDF.js pages without dropping frames in maximized windows and driving 2, 3, or more monitors than we are about demanding 3D OpenGL games. It would be nice to see the cairo-perf-trace benchmarks become part of all the GPU and graphics stack reviews.

It doesn't matter how well Quake 3 runs if I can't get vsynced compositing on all screens.

Isn't it generally accepted that Radeon runs circles and flips desks around Catalyst when it comes to consistent 2D performance?

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I've abandoned fglrx soon after I discoverd open sauce can run my three monitor setup on HD6850 just fine and decided to take 3D performance loss for great 2D performance and absence of headaches over compatibility with various kernels, xorg etc etc.

It seems that these days even perf 3D is coming close, so in near future it will be a no-brainer solution...